@Will: Both my girls are adopted. We felt our genes weren't very special (she's got scoliosis, I'm diabetic although I didn't know it then, I suppose, but anyhow) and the children were damn well out there. Of course, my wife's three siblings are all adopted, so it's not exactly a new idea to this family. Glad to see someone mention adoption -- too often there's a lot of railing against having children but no attention to an option in which everyone -- ideally -- wins.

One good thing about where I live I found a nice quarter section(160 acres)with a mobile home and some outbuildings well ,power ges etc on a all season road about 45KMs from town for less than 70 grand.

I'm currently building a cabin in the middle of the woods in south Georgia right now. I just want to putter around, write a bit, drink some whiskey, and be left the fuck alone during the coming apocalypse.

@unsub and will cabin in the woods off a ways from the world would be great. I'd love to get a piece of land and build myself a cabin on it. Too bad the (American at least) frontier (even in Alaska) is closed.

I'm right with both of you guys on that. as long as I can get the internet up at my cabin in the woods. I figure by the time I have the money (5-10 years at least) they'll have covered everything with broadband-speed cell phone service so it would be a problem.

@F. David Swallow II"I was just wondering how the TV and Radio License work the U.K.?"

Badly.

Roughly the scam is this - the BBC, as the first body to control these media, is the licensor. Even though you don't actually need to own a licence to listen to radio legally, you *do* need one for TV - and will be prosecuted for not having one. Vans equipped with TV signal triangulation gear (or, in the tinfoil-hat version, nothing buy an antenna on a rotating board and a bloody long list of possible infractors) can pull up to your door at any time, demand to see your licence and can fine you heavily for not producing proof of same. This £135.50 media tax all goes to the BBC to fund their programmes, even though of course there are many other stations, especially these days... and they don't get a penny. This was bearable until BBC Enterprises started selling ephemera (all those Doctor Who toys are licenced to them) and the shows (and the DVD sets) to other countries, which raises their revenue a lot and to my mind makes them an actual media company getting unfair amounts of cash from a government-mandated monopoly, its forced user base. It used to be that BBC showed no adverts - these days, they show an awful lot of them - for their own products of course, but still hawking Life On Mars DVD sets and such.

Occasional promises to allow UK licence-payers added access to all the classic shows they actually paid for in full has been mooted - the original plan of these files (for example shows like Who, Fawlty Towers, Monty Python and many others) to be online in DRM-free form for all has been changed to a DRM-riddled, Microsoft-based netfile player which won't talk to Mac and other Linux boxen.

Not to get off topic, but Red Dwarf, was an awesome show, i have the DVDs, and used to stay up late at night watching it here on IPTV(the iowa branch of PBS) as a kid. Whenever the donation drive hit in(During each show they would show this jerrry lewis like telethon were you had to call and and pledge money to keep whatever show was on at the time) Iowa was always number one for both Red Dwarf, and Red Green Show. I'm assuming that money went to the BBC.

Anyways, so do you have cable providers, or does it all come from the BBC. I could see paying it if like you said, there were no adverts, but as a subscription, like HBO, no forced to.

Yes, there are cable and satellite providers - but to actually use a television at all you have to pay the licence fee.Unless you can prove you're legally blind - in which case the BBC generously cut the licence fee in half! - or you go through a lengthy legal process to show you're never going to connect your set to any feed other than VCR, DVD or internet. Yeah, I know that's crazy.